a letter for you

Dear french class,

Just writing to remind you to give me a pat on the back for coming today. When I woke up with 15 minutes to get ready I was determined not to, but I was even early.

love,
M


Dear pride,

I regret to inform you that I swallowed you yesterday when I checked out Probability for Dummies from the library. I may have a great science-y GPA, but probability and I have never been able to understand one another. Mr. GRE, however, is forcing an intimate acquaintance.

I'm sure I'll see lots more of you,
M


Dear toilet,

Sorry you had to come up against an engineer's daughter. I have to say that you were no match for my paper clips and ingenuity. But thanks for working again.

regards,
M


Dear dove peppermint bark chocolate,

Thanks for not being sold out the second you went on the shelves this year. I really appreciate your company while I think about all the homework I should be doing but am not.

loves,
M


Dear thanksgiving break,

Thank you for coming. Food, sleep, and a break from real life is exactly what I needed.

you're the best,
M


Dear Till We Have Faces,

Thanks for being an awesome "I have to read for school but want to keep reading anyway" book. Unfortunately I've read what was assigned for the break already and I have 5 million other things to do, but maybe we'll hang out soon.

yours,
M


Dear family,

Wishing (already) that more of you were here for Franksgiving. My informative powerpoints won't be the same without such an attentive audience.

love you to the moon and back,
M

You know you're a microbiology major when... part VI

Your class field trip is to the sewage plant in Salt Lake.


Guess what? I can't wait.


It's true; I am a nerd.


M

The rest of the series can be found here

Wise man, Mr. Lewis

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket--safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell."

-C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Face

Ever feel like you can't face the things you need to do?

That was tonight. So instead I ate Dove chocolate and watched TV. Not one of my finest moments, but to be honest, I feel better. I've been caught up in the dark and windy webs of my mind for the past three weeks and I needed a break. I just couldn't think about anything anymore. So instead I curled up under the covers and pushed away the guilt.

Tomorrow I'll press reset and deal with the homework and decisions. Tonight I'm just going to be.

The girls those boys will marry

Girl 1: look at this
Girl 2: your abs?
Girl 1: yeah this line
Girl 2: ugh. Is that from your spray tan?
Girl 1: no it's from when she waxed me

Why there are no boys to marry at BYU

Boy 1: I mean when you read you have to imagine things yourself. I would rather have someone tell me what it looks like.

Boy 2: I know, seriously. I would much rather play on my ipad.

this thing

I walked in, finding only a smattering of people in the theater, all sitting in pairs. Great. My solitary presence won't be as easy to hide. There is something about going to a movie alone that always invites pity. I was fine with it (I mean who really wants to go to a French documentary about philosophy anyway?) but I felt like daggers of pity were being shot my way. Oh look at that poor girl, she came to international cinema all by herself. She doesn't have a cool, artsy boy with her like I do. Trust me, I don't need your daggers of pity or your artsy boys thankyouverymuch.

I sat with my head tilted to one side resting on my hand, willing myself to make it through all 84 minutes. I looked at the clock: It's only been 32 minutes? No way. I checked the clock again. 37 minutes. Kill. Me. Now. The movie was about Jacques Derrida, a French philosopher. It was weird, intriguing, boring, nauseating (can you say shaky and awkward camera movements?), interesting, thought-provoking, and really lame all rolled into one, 84 "feels like 1,000" minute documentary.

At one point someone asks him what he thinks about love. He gets all bent out of shape because he cannot (ce n'est pas possible!) answer a general, open-ended question like that. She struggles to narrow the question and eventually drags a response out of him. He tells her that when one talks about love, one has to ask who or what. Do you love the "absolute singularity" of the person or do you love that they are this or that, that they do this or that? Are we in love with the person or what they are?

I think when we are learning to love someone (not just romantically, but that too) we love what the person does, what they like, what we see of ourselves in them. But when we truly love someone, we love what Derrida calls the "absolute singularity" of that person. We just love them. period.

It made me think about the thousands of bridal showers I've been to. "So tell us all why you love Tom." "Well, I love Tom because he's so kind, he's funny and smart, and he always does such nice things for me." When we talk of love, we usually talk of what we love about the person, not the person. But as we grow in love, we learn to say in our heart: "I love Tom because he's Tom." He's enough.

I heart reading

"Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality. But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do."
-C.S. Lewis

"The value of myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by 'the veil of familiarity.' The child enjoys his cold meat (otherwise dull to him) by pretending it is buffalo, just killed with his own bow and arrow. And the child is wise. The real meat comes back to him more savoury for having been dipped in a story; you might say that only then is it the real meat. If you are tired of the real landscape, look at it in a mirror. By putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves."
-J.R.R. Tolkien